Venables pays price as Leeds ask Reid to salvage season

Leeds United will release their half-yearly results at the end of the month; they will not include the £3m paid to terminate David O'Leary's contract or the £1.5m paid to buy out Terry Venables and there will be no mention of the £1.75m reportedly given to the Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge, for his apparently peripheral part in the sale of Rio Ferdinand. The results are expected to be very bad indeed, if not quite on the scale of the record £33.8m losses posted last year.

Leeds are a club that can only be understood in terms of finances and as he announced the appointment of Peter Reid to become their third manager in less than a year, the chairman, Peter Ridsdale, while the cameras flashed around him at another Leeds crisis press conference, was talking the kind of language heard only in business seminars.

"Peter Reid has taken up the challenge to maximise our points from the balance of the season," he said. Translation: he has to win as many games as possible.

"There are many other football clubs looking to realign their cost base." Translation: we are not the only ones having to sell players.

At the last crisis conference, to explain away the sale of Jonathan Woodgate in January, Venables had sat grimly alongside his chairman while Ridsdale admitted to misleading him over the true state of the club's finances. Now, after eight tortuous months in probably his last management job, Venables, who in July was talked of as the man to bring championships back to Elland Road, had gone, two days after 17 members of staff were issued with redundancy notices.

Strongbow have opted not to renew their sponsorship of the club, which brought in £2.5m, and yesterday Ridsdale talked of further financial setbacks. Last season they were screened 11 times by Sky, at £680,000 a game. This season it has been four, although the cameras will be at Anfield tomorrow, where Reid first fell in love with football, to see them play Liverpool. Falling from fifth, a position which earned O'Leary the sack, to 15th would see a drop in prize money of £4m.

Ultimately, Venables was fired because Leeds' balance sheet could not stomach the £15m loss in revenue relegation would bring. Since they are seven points above the drop zone with eight games remaining, their position was becoming alarming for a club of their size and recent history, and Ridsdale pointed out that the last eight matches had brought one victory, an unconvincing 1-0 defeat of West Ham in a period that included a second embarrassing cup exit at the hands of Sheffield United.

When Ridsdale sacked O'Leary in June, the conversation was brief, with the Irishman requesting only to phone his solicitor, Michael Kennedy, before publicly vowing never to speak again to the man to whom he dedicated his book. The dismissal of Venables lasted two hours, although Ridsdale claimed tempers were not lost; he called the meeting "dignified". Given that Venables had spoken of his contempt for Ridsdale when the chairman had travelled to the Leeds training ground at Thorp Arch to inform him of Woodgate's sale and said he felt like a "patsy", tempers must have been kept well in check.

Reid was phoned at nine o'clock yesterday morning. "I'd just got in," quipped the Liverpudlian, his wit undiluted by five months away from frontline football.

Reid's brief will be precise and brief. He will be paid on a match-by-match basis and given a bonus if Leeds retain their Premiership status, but sources within Elland Road indicated he will not be considered for the post in the summer. Given his strengths of getting the maximum from supposedly underachieving footballers that served him well at Sunderland, this is a surprise. Leeds have their eyes on a manager already in employment; Paul Hart, who has transformed Nottingham Forest on the tightest of budgets, and Micky Adams at Leicester are obvious targets. Given that Martin O'Neill has turned them down twice at times when Leeds were burning money, he would be foolish to quit Celtic for the uncertainties of Elland Road, although Gordon Strachan might be tempted to put his reputation on the line.

But if Reid salvages Leeds in style, the board may find themselves with no room for manoeuvre, which would be par for their course. Almost exactly eight years ago, Reid was given a similar contract – seven games to prevent Sunderland sliding into the old Third Division. They were First Division champions the following season.

Strachan commented recently that he almost needed to be sacked as Coventry manager; he had stayed too long and become stale. "Spot on," Reid said when asked if he felt the same about his seven-year reign on Wearside. "I was possibly there too long, having had time to look back. This gives me a great opportunity. You must be an idiot if you don't want to manage Leeds United."

Wisely, Reid, who speaks the language of the dressing-room not the boardroom, did not dwell on the past in this volatile corner of Yorkshire. Nevertheless, he sounded a populist note by indicating that David Batty, whose links to Leeds date back to Howard Wilkinson's championship-winning side of 1992 but who was frozen out by Venables, will be in the squad to play Liverpool.

That, at least, will win over some fans who never took to Venables, although since Woodgate's sale their anger has been directed at Ridsdale. Last Saturday, he was jostled and jeered by supporters in the directors' box as he watched the 3-2 defeat by Middlesbrough. That result proved the last failure of Venables' regime, which was undermined by the sale of more than £53m worth of footballers – £200,000 for every one of the 255 days he was in charge.

Ridsdale was asked if Venables had been given a fair deal by Leeds United. "I'm not sure what that means in life," he replied. "We are all dealt the cards we are dealt."

Venables might feel that some of his came from the bottom of the pack.